under every disadvantage; and if the general result of the whole is to confuse the distinctions of right and wrong-then are there other higher than mere esthetic considerations that compel us to raise our voice against the insult offered to the moral sense and feeling of the community. These are the charges that we allege, and that, did our space permit and were it at all desirable, we could easily substantiate against a number of our modern novels.

Miss Evans does not belong to the "sensation" school, but certainly her tales are open to these moral objections. Adam Bede, we have always thought, was judged with extraordinary leniency, owing, probably, to the favorable impression produced by the opening chapters, and the fact that there was an amount of apparent reverence shown throughout for moral and religious worth. But who that is at all concerned about the ethical tendency of such books, can read it a second time, calmly and dispassionately, without feeling that there is an under-current of sentiment pervading the whole that is any thing but favorable to high-toned virtue? The Mill on the Floss was far more undisguised in its character. It is true that it did not actually justify, or even extenuate vice; but its influence certainly tended to abate the sentiment of horror with which any approach to it should be regarded. It can not be too often repeated that this is just the kind of representation most to be dreaded. If vice be exhibited in its own naked deformity, the result is a portraiture too loathsome to be endured by any but the most abandoned: but these carefully drawn pictures in which the darker shades are kept out of sight, or so mellowed and toned down as to lose much of their unpleasant character, and the general effect is relieved by the introduction of other features, command attention and awaken a sympathy which would be refused were their real character and design better understood.

Mrs. Wood is a writer who puzzles us. Some of her stories are as pure, as free from every thing that could offend, as earnest in their inculcation of virtue, as any writings of their class. On the other hand, others are just as unhealthy in their tone and as questionable in their principles. Perhaps, in all there is too much straining after effect. Even Danesbury House, which obtained the prize offered by the Scottish Temperance League, and

first won her a name, is, to a very glaring extent, disfigured by this fault. Of course, it was the desire of those who instituted the competition that the story should represent drunkenness as the parent of all vice and misery; but it must have required strong digestion even for a teetotaller to swallow all the horrors that Mrs. Wood has crowded into the narrow compass of her tale. It may be that the ad. judicators had nothing better offered to them; but, believing that the moral effect of the book is utterly destroyed by its exaggeration, we have always regretted their decision, and viewed it as one evidence of that growing appetite for sensation which is the curse of our literature. We object, too, to the general moral of Mrs. Wood's good books, in which virtue is always rewarded, and vice always punished. This may be poetic justice, but it is not that which marks God's dealings with men in the present life; and it certainly rests the appeal on behalf of goodness on the lowest possible ground. But these are very venial faults compared with those Mrs. Wood has perpetrated in some of her other works. East Lynne is one of the most powerful, but one, also, of the most mischievous, books of the day. Throughout an exciting, though very improbable, story, our sympathies are excited on behalf of one who has betrayed the most sacred trust man can repose in woman. All that the union of beauty, rank, talent, and misfortune can do to create a prejudice in favor of the criminal is done, while the sense of the enormity of her crime is greatly enfeebled by the unamiable light in which her husband is presented. To exhibit a woman possessed of every natural gift that could call forth admiration, and then to surround her with circumstances that seem, as though by a resistless fate, to draw her into sin, is to inflict serious injury on the interests of morality; for which it is but very poor compensation to find that the sin is followed by a certain amount of suffering. Verner's Pride is hardly less objectionable. Happily, however, we have not in it to deal with that kind of complication in which our lady novelists delight-a man with two wives, or a wife with two husbands. At one part of the story we appeared to be on the verge of it, and, therefore, ought to be the more grateful for the deliverance. The Shadow of Ashlydyat, apart from the supernatural ma

chinery which is introduced, is a clever story, but not free from the taint that sullies those just named. We can see no possible good, and much probable harm, to arise from the exhibition of such relations as those here depicted between George Godolphin and Charlotte Pain. Mrs. Wood is capable of better things; we trust she will yet perform them, and that she will live to blot out the memory of the errors committed in the worst class of her novels by the abler and more ennobling books of a brighter future. If she would write better, she should write less, and should eschew every temptation to pander to a depraved appetite, and to purchase a present and unworthy popularity by the loss of a more enduring and

nobler fame.

But the most egregious offender against good morals and correct taste is Miss Braddon, with the "fast" ladies whom she selects for heroines, and the equivocal positions in which she contrives to place them, with the exciting scenes of passion which she loves to draw, and no doubt draws with great power; and, above all, with (what a medical journal has pointed out in several cases) her frequent contemplation of suicide as the refuge from all human griefs. This feature is seen in one of her earliest books, The Trail of the Serpent, and is more or less manifest in most of the others. Books more subtle and more pernicious it would not be easy to find. They are clever, very clever; their plots often improbable, but always exciting; they will while away a leisure hour very pleasantly, and are sure to be eagerly read; while few readers will give any heed to the moral poison which is every where diffused through them.

The Times tells us that they are written only to amuse; and no doubt they succeed in their purpose. But the question arises, whether we may not pay too dear a price for amusement. If it is not possible to furnish amusement, except by giving the

most false conceptions of duty, and the most unreal pictures of life; if our young people can only be entertained by being introduced to scenes of passion, folly, and murder; if the only actors by whose doings their time can be enlivened, and the necessary mental recreation secured, are ladies who deceive their fathers, and hoodwink their husbands, who indulge in the slang of grooms and jockeys, and practice all the arts of gamblers, who get rid of inconvenient partners by murder, and strive to conceal their guilt by arson; and who, in fact, do not scruple to transgress every law of the Decalogue, if it be necessary for the attainment of their own ends-then it is better that we do without amusement altogether. We should speak less severely if we saw in Miss Braddon's recent works any sign of improvement. But we do not. Eleanor's Victory is, in our view, one of the most painful books she has written. That a young girl should form a plan of revenge, should make it the companion of her thoughts night and day for years, should feign love and marry a trusting and noble minded man, solely because the alliance seemed to promise her success in the one aim of her life, should, in truth, yield her whole soul and body up to the dominion of this violent passion, is a conception happily so monstrous as to be incredible; but its elaboration in a work of art is an outrage on right feeling, as well as a mistake in judgment.

But we must close, only expressing an earnest desire that we may, ere long, see the rise of a purer school. Fiction may be a valuable auxiliary in the advancement of goodness and truth; and we may naturally wish to see it wielded by men of high character for the attainment of pure and noble ends. As it is, there is much in the novels of the day against which every wise parent will warn his children, as unfitted either to instruct the mind, or purify the heart.

In those early days, and for many centuries after, the merchant was the captain of his own little ship, and thus had the entire range of his business under his own supervision. He was deservedly held in honor by his countrymen. By a law of Athelstan, published near the middle of the tenth century, it was appointed that every merchant, even though he were by birth a serf, who had made three jour neys across the sea with his own ship and goods, was to have the rank of a thane. The ships were mere boats, rude constructions of wood, propelled by eight or ten oars, with the assistance of a single square sail suspended from a single mast, and seldom large enough to hold more than half a dozen men, with two or three tons of cargo. Yet in these poor vessels, having no other compass than the sun and stars, and no proper rudder to direct their motions, our fearless forefathers wandered wherever they would. The silks and pigments, referred to in the dialogue just cited, could hardly have come from a nearer part than Italy or Marseilles. We know that trading voyages were often made to Rome, and that in the eighth century one Anglo-Saxon merchant, at any rate, was settled, and had influential position in Marseilles.

bridge, and exhibited them in the streets for sale; and Chester was filled during the summer months by Irishmen, bringing marten-skins and other articles to sell, and buying in exchange the various commodities most needed by their own people.

Some branches of Anglo-Saxon commerce, it must be admitted, were not altogether respectable. In a memoir of another Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester at the time of the Norman Conquest, it is said: "There is a seaport town called Bristol, opposite to Ireland, to which its inhabitants make frequent voyages of trade. Wulfstan cured the people of this town of a most odious custom, which they derived from their ancestors, of buying men and women in all parts of England, and exporting them to Ireland for the sake of gain. You might have seen, with sorrow, long ranks of youths and maidens, of the greatest beauty, tied together with ropes, and daily exposed to sale; nor were these men ashamed-oh! horrid wickedness!-to give up their nearest relations, even their own children, to slavery." It is to be hoped that dealings of this sort were not very common; but it is clear that during these centuries the Irish, or rather, perhaps, the Danes, who were masters of a large part of Ireland, carried on a considerable trade with England. In very early times their merchants brought cloths to Cam

Yet English commerce was still in its infancy. By one of the laws of Lothair, of Kent, living in the seventh century, no one was allowed to buy any thing worth more than twenty pennies-something like five pounds, according to the present value of money-except within the walls of a town, and in the presence of the chief magistrate, or two or more witnesses. Another of Lothair's laws appoints that "If any one of the people of Kent buy any thing in the city of London, he must have two or three honest men, or the king's port-reeve, present at the bargain ;" and in a third it is written: "Let none exchange one thing for another, except in the presence of the sheriff, the mass priest, the lord of the manor, or some other person of undoubted veracity. If they do otherwise, they shall pay a fine of thirty shillings, besides forfeiting the goods so exchanged to the lord of the manor." From such enactments we infer, in the first place, that rogues were so numerous, and false dealings so prevalent, even in these early days, that it was not safe for trade to be carried on in any but the most public manner; and, in the second, that, from the beginning, states and municipalities obtained part of their revenues from imports upon articles of commerce. In Lewes, at the time of the Domesday Survey, a tax of a farthing was levied by the sheriff on the sale of every ox; and when a slave changed hands, the payment due to the town exchequer was fourpence. In most parts of the kingdom, moreover, perhaps in all, a percentage on the price of every article sold for more than twenty pennies was divided between the king and the lord of the manor, half being levied from the buyer and half from the seller. The fairs or markets spread over the kingdom also paid toll to the crown. We read of one in Bedfordshire that yielded seven pounds a year, and of another at Taunton which produced about fifty shillings.

Fairs did the work of shops in AngloSaxon and Anglo-Norman times, and in doing so they gradually lost the religious character with which they were at first